


Tulips

by SpecialTrampAgentOtters (Elsie1285)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s02e08 One Breath, F/M, Sylvia Plath - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7279516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsie1285/pseuds/SpecialTrampAgentOtters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And I a smiling woman.<br/>I am only thirty.<br/>And like the cat I have nine times to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tulips

I have done it again. 

The first time it happened, I was fourteen: whey-faced and easily blushed by sunlight, skin scorched by hours of rambunctious play on the San Diego shore. The blisters on my shoulders by the close of day were bulbous and rippling with putrid syrup and the searing pain was enough to make my eyelids flutter, squinting into the innocent dusky-light. 

Ahab swiped me from the sand, capable hands careful to avoid the furious welts on my upper arms as he dunked me into the cool embrace of the Pacific. The vesicles almost hissed, fizzing as their temperature plummeted in the California dusk and the agony of the sudden change clouded my consciousness, my teenaged tears indistinguishable from the rolling waves of my watery-bed. 

My father turned back to the beach, eyes scanning for my siblings as they prowled the strand. His gaze alighted on Missy, oblivious to the gluey jellyfish on the water’s edge just below her hovering foot. Loosening his grip on my burnt arms, he began to wade to shore, urgency lacing his voice. In the scant few seconds it took to gain her attention and move her from danger, I had bobbed under. My arms were static, throbbing in cool aqua, and strawberry swirls of hair kissed my cheeks in the gloom as I sunk. A strong swimmer, it didn't occur to me to paddle my feet. Instead I submerged, drooping, eyes listless. 

It wasn’t until I registered muffled screams, punctuated by the rough tug of Bill’s furious hands, that I remembered to try and breathe. The water filled my lungs, flooding my windpipe and coating my mouth with a layer of salt before I was manhandled from the sea, blisters be-damned, and hurled to the sand. My lips were tinged with a purplish haze but my eyes were focused, alive as I coughed up the poisoned waters. 

“What were you thinking?” My mother’s shrill shriek wobbled with pre-emptive grief as her words swam in and out of my consciousness. “...could have drowned?” It was an accident, they told themselves. It had to be. “Why didn’t you swim?” 

It’s a sort of walking miracle, my skin. There is no physical evidence of that day, my marmoreal shoulders bearing no scars; my lips a raspberry wound, their blackberry cast long gone.

The second time I meant to last it out, and not come back at all. 

It’s alarming the ease with which a final-year medical student in their late-twenties could access self-destructive pharmaceuticals in the very early nineties. What’s more alarming is the regularity with which medical students sought them out. 36-hour shifts bookended with end of semester tests and a myriad of textbooks through which to wade during perceived “downtime”: is it any wonder so many of us found another way out?

Our haggard, worn faces were masks as we haunted the corridors of hospitals and lecture theatres. We convinced ourselves we wanted to be there; we had our eyes on the sterile prize and the opulent lifestyles of comfortable family practitioners in our small towns and suburbs. We were washed smooth; no expression, like pebbles in eddies. But peel off the napkin; we terrified. Our souls peered out, our insecurities shone through listless, exhausted eyes. 

It had never really occurred to me that I was dissatisfied with the life chosen for me until I stood in the dispensary in the hospital, mid-rotation, the pharmacist aiding me called away on an emergency. I spun sluggishly on my heel, easing unsympathetic knots from my shoulders with trembling digits affixed to arms, stringy from neither the time nor inclination for sustenance. The squeak of sensible rubber-soled shoes caused a sadistic tingle down my spine as I surveyed the cornucopia of coping mechanisms surrounding me. The bottles and boxes were lined up: neat, orderly rows like unmarked graves or a procession of mourners after a hearse. The advent of automated medication dispensing machines was upon us, but I was lucky enough to be in a Department yet to catch on. Codeine, Vicodin and ether blanketed the walls, a plethora of opiates and barbiturates. I knew of chemical dependency on analgesics and anesthetics within my peers; the cotton-wool comfort of a fuzzy head and a blissful, dreamless sleep. We indulged in nothing so pedestrian as alcoholism and an array of one-night stands when we had a bounty of medications at our fingertips.

Before I realized it, a bottle of Roxicodone had beckoned from the shelf, the seductive sheen of the bottle sneering at the smudges under my eyes, before it was secreted into the cavernous pockets of my whites. Every step I took from the pharmacy I fancied it rattled, cackling and mocking my easy-way-out until I was home, curled cat-like on my narrow single bed, my shared apartment in Governor’s Corner Suites uncharacteristically private, the grave cave hush creeping its chilled fingers across the scuffed wooden floors and up over my clavicle. 

The tablets had slid down, washed by the surf of a quart bottle of vodka and the room misted, gaseous yellow fog tickling at the side of my corneas as I catalogued each plane of my face: The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth. My consciousness clouded and I swore I felt the skin fall away, the rot set into the molars, the face a featureless fine linen, clammy and cold.

I climbed back out of my crypt a full 4 minutes later, retching, guttering. I knew what my traumatized roommate would have found had I not made myself violently sick, what the medical chart would have said had I allowed the opiates take hold of my system: depressed respiratory functions; somnolence, stupor or coma; skin slick, like the chill after a California thunderstorm; pupils constricted to feline darts. I knew the cautious looks that would follow me down hospital corridors months after my recovery; would have had to learn to anticipate the checked conversations: the hyperbolic suicidal reactions to lecherous kisses or 36-hour shifts becoming stalled and bitten back in casual conversations. I knew any escape route I had planned would become infinitely more difficult if I couldn’t keep my near-death escape buried deep in its shroud. 

It took less than three months for me to walk out of a hospital in California and into Quantico. Another fifteen to spin into the arms of Fox Mulder. And another sixteen to be sacrificed to Skyland Mountain by Duane Barry, only to be returned, blown-hollow from procedures I don’t remember.

I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

I am tethered to the jetty, the amniotic rocking of the boat soporific even as my brain screams for release. The bark strains against the rope, yearning for independence from the land. The bright bleeps and hisses of ventilators tug at my subconscious and it never occurs to me to question the presence of them as my mind floods with cataract images of Missy’s hands, passing the way gulls pass, across my body. Her fingers trail, treacle-sticky, through my fading aura, pulling me back and forth from the shore; still the boat undulates, unstable and imbalanced. Until he speaks:

“I feel, Scully... that you believe... you’re not ready to go. And you’ve always had the strength of your beliefs. I don’t know if my being here... will help bring you back. But I’m here.”

Nobody watched me before; now I am watched.

The boat tips, rocks and the forest contracts, like a pupil, until I am surrounded by verdant vegetation which fades as tacky tape is teased from my eyelids and excitable tulips quiver and cower at my bedside. I don’t want any flowers, I only want to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. Worried fingers push and probe, dissecting my physical ailments; my mental fluctuations are snowed-in and ploughed to one side to be addressed later. 

The move from ICU to my room brings palpable relief; privacy to process my third escape from my funeral pyre. Mom sits silent, fingers caressing skin of hands she never thought would respond to her again. Missy watches the world from the window. The flowers, drooping with chill and neglect, are sickly, their scent breathing nauseous fire across my senses until a zephyr of air-conditioning heralds the entrance of Mulder, his eyes glassy with relief and grief. I turn and he meets my gaze, soul to soul.

And, out of the ash, I rise with my red hair.

**Author's Note:**

> The final line of ‘Lady Lazarus’ has always reminded me of Scully, especially post-Tithonus and the immortality question.   
> However, ‘Tulips’ is one of my favourite Plath poems and when I started writing water became a very insistent image.   
> Therefore, I decided this was better as a run up to the events of ‘One Breath’. It is highly unlike me to write stories based pre-Season 4 so this is quite a new foray for me.   
> There’s some fairly obvious lifting of some lines from both Plath poems here, so my disclaimer needs to cover both The X Files and Plath.


End file.
